Why the Feds Are Clinging to Their Mask Mandate

Bureaucrats cling to power. It’s their institutional predisposition.

So it was no surprise on Wednesday when the Department of Justice appealed the recent Federal court ruling that struck down the mask mandate imposed on mass transportation by the Centers for Disease Control.

As the appeal demonstrates, governments are especially reluctant to give up emergency powers. When they do, the relinquishment is grudging and only partial.

That is a big reason why big government keeps getting bigger. As economist Robert Higgs showed in his book Crisis and Leviathan, since the early 20th century, the US government has exploited every national emergency to seize emergency powers.

After the crisis subsides, government power recedes, but never all the way back to pre-crisis levels. In this way, the federal government “ratchets up” its power, at the expense of our liberty, crisis after crisis.

This “ratchet effect,” as Higgs termed it, is on vivid display in airports especially. There, the travel mask mandate persisted long after the pandemic panic subsided and many other COVID policies were rolled back. And if the DOJ’s appeal succeeds, it may return and linger even longer.

The wretched ratchet effect is also manifest in the many post-9/11 airport security policies that the Transportation Security Administration continues to enforce more than two decades after the crisis that spawned them.

A curious aspect of many of these policies is how seemingly petty they are. Why is the government so adamant about travelers removing their shoes at security and wearing masks? The effectiveness of such measures has been shown to be highly dubious at best. Moreover, such compelled performances of “security theater” and “hygiene theater” don’t even seem to provide much material benefit to the government. What’s the point of ratcheting up that kind of power?

I suspect a major purpose of such petty policies is the mass inculcation of obedience. Security theater and hygiene theater are part and parcel of a broader “obedience theater.” Humiliating compulsory gestures like removing your shoes and wearing your mask are obeisances: symbolic ritual acts of self-abasement and submission.

It’s not about keeping you safe or healthy. It’s about showing you who’s boss.

https://catalyst.independent.org/2022/04/22/feds-mask-mandate/

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COVID-19 Vaccine Can Trigger Acute Hepatitis

A recent case report about a man who received an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine suggests that taking the vaccine “may trigger immune-mediated hepatitis,” researchers wrote.

The case report does not indicate how common such a case would be, although researchers said that such a scenario is recognized as a “rare adverse event not identified in early trials.”

The report, published in the Journal of Hepatology in late April, describes the case of a man in Germany aged 52 who developed acute hepatitis—liver inflammation—two to three weeks after having received an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech (the BNT163b2 vaccine).

Researchers said they found that highly-activated T cells “accumulate and are evenly distributed in the different areas” of the man’s liver after he took the COVID-19 vaccine and developed acute hepatitis. T cells are a type of white blood cell that comprise a key part of the immune system. These cells focus on fighting new infections.

The patient experienced nausea and fatigue about 10 days after his first dose of the vaccine, and was subsequently found to have acute hepatitis. The hepatitis resolved on its own after about three days. He had a second dose of the vaccine 41 days after his first dose. Symptoms of nausea and fatigue returned 20 days later—he was given an oral steroid medication and initially improved. He relapsed 39 days later, after which he was successfully treated with systemic immunosuppressive therapy that also included steroids. The man’s liver function tests “subsequently normalized within 8 weeks.”

Researchers said the man’s immune response to the COVID-19 vaccine may have contributed to his liver inflammation. The COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer “may trigger immune-mediated hepatitis by mechanisms linked to vaccine-induced cellular immunity,” they said in the case report.

Within the T cells that were found in the liver, the scientists observed “an enrichment of T cells that are reactive to SARS-CoV-2, suggesting that these vaccine-induced cells can contribute to the liver inflammation in this context.”

Specifically, the type of T cell called CD8 T cells “represented the most abundant immune cell subset” found in the liver. “Our analysis highlights that activated cytotoxic CD8 T cells including vaccine-induced spike-specific CD8 T cells could contribute to disease pathogenesis,” researchers wrote.

“Based on their strong enrichment … we speculated that CD8 T cells could be drivers of the hepatic inflammation.”

The authors called the case one that appears to be autoimmune hepatitis, but is not. “Autoimmune-hepatitis-like disease after vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 is now recognized as a rare adverse event not identified in early trials,” they wrote. “The widespread use of the vaccine with administration of hundreds of million doses worldwide raises also questions of causality vs. coincidence.”

The authors wrote it is important to differentiate autoimmune hepatitis from hepatitis triggered by immune responses after COVID-19 vaccination; the former requires lifelong immunosuppressive therapy in many patients, while the latter is possibly transient, they noted.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-19-vaccine-can-trigger-acute-hepatitis-case-report_4442123.html

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Tearing Down the Silicon Valley Wall

Elon Musk has finally managed to buy Twitter. And the moment he did, the enraged left flipped out.

Abruptly, leftists began trashing their favorite electronic communications platform as the domain of the nation’s elite, professional classes. Had they just discovered that they had been racists and privileged users all this time?

And what happened to the left’s former worship of Musk as the man who revolutionized the clean, green automobile industry with his Tesla electric car company?

Or Musk, the space revolutionary and hip star trekker, who with his own money helped ensure the United States remains preeminent in space exploration?

Or Musk, the patriot who is providing free next-generation internet service to the underdog Ukrainians fighting Russians for their lives?

No matter. The left reviles Musk because he has announced that Twitter will be the one social media platform whose business is not to censor or massage free speech in an otherwise monopolist, intolerant, and hard-left Silicon Valley.

Who knows, Musk might even allow former President Donald Trump to communicate on Twitter—in the fashion that the terrorist Taliban, Iranian theocrats, and violent Antifa protesters all take for granted in their daily access to Twitter.

But how did the once free speech, anti-trust, “let it all hang out” left become a Victorian busybody, a censorious Soviet, and an old-fashioned robber-baron monopoly?

When it discovered that few Americans wanted left-wing, socialist politics it turned elsewhere. It found power instead through control of American institutions, from academia and Wall Street to traditional and social media.

When Musk merely talked about buying Twitter, the left shrieked that an outlier multibillionaire owning a media—and especially a social media—venue was unfair. The buyout was supposedly “dangerous” and “a threat to democracy.”

But the more the left screamed, the less people listened.

After all, left-wing Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has roughly 15 times more market capitalization than Twitter. It has an audience of 2 billion users—over seven times larger than Twitter’s 271 million.

Zuckerberg’s monopoly on global social media and his enormous wealth were stealthily put in service to the Democratic Party in the 2020 election. He reportedly infused nearly $420 million of his media money into warping the vote in key precincts, by augmenting and absorbing the work of state registrars to empower likely left-wing voters.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the second wealthiest man in the world, owns the influential Washington Post. It has moved markedly to the activist left under his patronage.

Multibillionaire Lisa Jobs, widow of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, owns The Atlantic. It has become an increasingly hard-left political magazine.

So in Orwellian fashion, apparently most media-owning, left-wing billionaires are good? But one social media-owning, non-left-wing billionaire is bad?

How exactly might a Musk-owned Twitter alter an election?

By emulating the former directors of Twitter and the rest of Silicon Valley social media who canceled not just conservatives, but any new communication they felt harmful to the 2020 Biden campaign?

From the outset, it was clear that Hunter Biden’s lost laptop incriminated his dad, Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Biden was referenced by his own quid pro quo, grifting son variously as “the Big Guy” and “Mr. Ten Percent”—a full partner in peddling Beltway influence to rich foreign actors.

Yet in lockstep, social media banned most coverage of the pre-election laptop story.

It instead spread its standby false narrative of “Russian disinformation.” We now know the laptop was always authentic. The crude efforts to suppress mention of it were classic politicized news suppression.

Still, the left may well have some reason to be terrified of Musk. Should he liberate Twitter from left-wing scolds and groupthinkers, would other renegade new companies and old standbys follow his lead?

Is Musk’s $46 billion acquisition the internet equivalent of Germans in November 1989 with sledgehammers smashing down the Berlin Wall?

Does Musk sense that the looming November midterm elections may result in one of the rare landslide verdicts in American history?

Does he assume the public prefers a muckraker who demands free speech rather than corporate insider cronies censoring expression they don’t find useful?

Polls show that the American people have had their fill of 14 months of self-inflicted, ideology-driven disasters. And why not, given the nonexistent border, spiking crime, inflation, unaffordable gasoline, and neo-Confederate racial fixations?

Are the recent Netflix implosion, the CNN+ disaster, the Disney debacle, the Virginia statewide and San Francisco school board elections, the polls showing massive defections of Latinos from the left, the grassroots pushback against government-imposed mask wearing, and explicit transgender education in the k-3 grades also symptoms of a reckoning on the horizon?

The country is ready for a revolution. And Musk believes he can lead it with his Silicon Valley sledgehammer. So, as the left says, “Bring it on.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/28/tearing-down-the-silicon-valley-wall/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

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